Thursday, February 5, 2015

Answering RJ Eskow’s rather easy questions for libertarians

In September of 2013, I stumbled across this very silly article
by R.J. Eskow and decided to write a blog post refuting it (yes, that’s how
backlogged my blog ideas are before I finally finish them). Anyways, I
finally got around to it. I’ll go line by line. His quotes are in purple, and
my responses are in black.

Libertarians have a problem.
Their political philosophy all but died out in the mid- to late-20th century,
but was revived by billionaires and corporations that found them politically
useful. And yet libertarianism retains the qualities that led to its
disappearance from the public stage, before its reanimation by people like the
Koch brothers: It doesn’t make any sense.

It’s worth noting that at no point in this raving and
incoherent article does Eskow ever substantiate his oft repeated claim that
libertarianism “all but died out in the mid- to late-20th century.”
If I had to guess, this is probably because it absolutely did no such thing. Nor
does he substantiate his suggestion that the rapidly approaching libertarian era
of widespread social tolerance and fiscal conservatism our nation is about to
enter, which his article is a desperate and transparent attempt to reverse, is
entirely the doing of a bunch of good-for-nothing selfish rich people. It’s a
pity, because I’d very much like to hear his theory as to why libertarian ideas
better serve corporate interests now than they did back then.

Amusingly, insinuating that public opinion is so easily
manipulated by a mere handful of wealthy puppeteers, conspiring behind the
scenes to feed the sheeple what they want them to believe, sounds remarkably
similar to some of the most outlandish of libertarian conspiracy theories.

They call themselves
“realists” but rely on fanciful theories that have never predicted
real-world behavior. They claim that selfishness makes things better for
everybody, when history shows exactly the opposite is true. They claim that a
mythical “free market” is better at everything than the government
is, yet when they really need government protection, they’re the first to
clamor for it.

Once again, it’s tough to refute such vague claims with
anything but vague denials. If he’d like to back one of them up, hopefully this
exercise will become something more interesting than he-said-she-said. I will
remark that I don’t advocate selfishness; I’m merely not audacious enough to
consider giving away other people’s money selfless.

That’s no reason not to work
with them on areas where they’re in agreement with people like me. In fact, the
unconventionality of their thought has led libertarians to be among this
nation’s most forthright and outspoken advocates for civil liberties and
against military interventions.

I welcome the help, although I had to chuckle at the “people
like me” bit. He could have said “work with them on the few areas they stumble
into the right answer”, or something to that effect, thereby applying to an
audience larger than the pitiable group of people who agree with R.J. Eskow on
absolutely everything. But I suppose “the right answer” and “agreement with me”
are so conceptually inseparable to him as to be unworthy of distinction.

Merriam-Webster defines
“hypocrisy” as “feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does
not.” We aren’t suggesting every libertarian is a hypocrite. But there’s an
easy way to find out.

The Other Libertarianism

First, some background. There is
a kind of libertarianism that’s nothing more or less than a strain in the
American psyche, an emotional tendency toward individualism and personal
liberty. That’s fine and even admirable.

We’re talking about
the other libertarianism, the political philosophy whose avatar is
the late writer Ayn Rand. It was once thought that this extreme brand of
libertarianism, one that celebrates greed and even brutality, had died in the
early 1980s with Rand herself. Many Rand acolytes had already gone underground,
repressing or disavowing the more extreme statements of their youth and
attempting to blend in with more mainstream schools of thought in respectable
occupations.

I tip my hat to Eskow for acquitting the “strain in the
American psyche” that likes individual liberty, even if only in passing. Truly,
this strain is the heart of all libertarianism.

Unfortunately, that’s where Eskow’s understanding of
libertarianism’s many nuances abruptly ends. His idea that any self-described
libertarian who can articulate their beliefs as something more than an
“emotional tendency,” in fact as a coherent, logical, developed holistic and internally
consistent philosophy, can be clumped into one group – the Ayn Rand people – is
complete nonsense. I for one don’t even like Ayn Rand. If Eskow is interested
in many varied perspectives that make up the foundation of the libertarian
tradition, I invite him to start with Locke, Mill, Spooner, von Mises, Hayek,
Hazlitt, Reed, Friedman (both Milton and David!), Rothbard, and Nozick. Somehow
I doubt he’ll take me up on that.

There was a good reason for
that. Randian libertarianism is an illogical, impractical, inhumane, unpopular
set of Utopian ravings which lacks internal coherence and has never predicted
real-world behavior anywhere. That’s why, reasonably enough, the libertarian
movement evaporated in the late 20th century, its followers scattered like the
wind.

At least one of the above authors was alive and writing to
an enthusiastic audience at all points during the 20th century. The
libertarian movement evaporated only in the wishful imaginations of people who
do not like libertarianism.

Pay to Play

But the libertarian movement has
seen a strong resurgence in recent years, and there’s a simple reason for that:
money, and the personal interests of some people who have a lot of it. Once
relegated to drug-fueled college-dorm bull sessions, political libertarianism
suddenly had pretensions of legitimacy. This revival is Koch-fueled, not
coke-fueled, and exists only because in political debate, as in so many other
walks of life, cash is king.

The Koch brothers are principal
funders of the Reason Foundation and Reason magazine. Exxon
Mobil and other corporate and billionaire interests are behind the Cato
Institute, the other public face of libertarianism. Financiers have also seeded
a number of economics schools, think tanks, and other institutions with
proponents of their brand of libertarianism. It’s easy to explain why some of
these corporate interests do it. It serves the self-interest of the
environmental polluters, for example, to promote a political philosophy which
argues that regulation is bad and the market will correct itself. And every
wealthy individual benefits from tax cuts for the rich. What better way to
justify that than with a philosophy that says they’re rich because
they’re better—and that those tax cuts help everybody?

Reason Magazine was
founded in 1968, and the Cato Institute was founded in 1977 – right during that
“late 20th century” period when libertarianism was allegedly dying
out. It was followed by the wildly popular small-government rhetoric of Reagan
in the 80’s and Newt Gingrich in the 90’s (though, to be clear, neither are
exactly libertarian heroes). So the timing of his theory just doesn’t make
sense in the first place.

But let’s presume
libertarianism really did die out in the late 20th century, and that
it really has been reborn instead of just steadily growing in popularity ever
since 2008. If Eskow’s theory is that moneyed interests fully explains the
resurgence of libertarianism, he’ll need to explain why libertarianism better
suited those moneyed interests in 2008 than it did in 1998 or 1988, which seems
pretty dubious to me.

The rise of the Silicon Valley
economy has also contributed to the libertarian resurgence. A lot of Internet
billionaires are nerds who suddenly find themselves rich and powerful, and
they’re emotionally and intellectually inclined toward libertarianism’s geeky
and unrealistic vision of a free market. In their minds its ideas are
“heuristic,” “autologous” and “cybernetic”—all of which has inherent attraction
in their culture.

The only problem is: It’s only a
dream. At no time or place in human history has there been a working
libertarian society which provided its people with the kinds of outcomes
libertarians claim it will provide. But libertarianism’s self-created mythos
claims that it’s more realistic than other ideologies, which
is the opposite of the truth. The slope from that contradiction to the deep
well of hypocrisy is slippery, steep—and easy to identify.

For most of human history, there had never been a society
which outlawed slavery (so far as I know). This does not mean that outlawing
slavery was a bad idea, or that trying new things which haven’t been done
before is a waste of time. While it’s true there has never been a libertarian
society that provided its people with the kinds of outcomes libertarians claim
it will provide, that’s only because there has never been a libertarian society
period, which doesn’t prove much in terms of which outcomes we claim would
arise from it.

That being said, some countries have been relatively freer
from government intrusion than others, and there’s good reason to believe those
with less intrusion yield better outcomes overall.

The Libertarian Hypocrisy
Test

That’s where the Libertarian
Hypocrisy Test comes in. Let’s say we have a libertarian friend, and we want to
know whether or not he’s hypocritical about his beliefs. How would we go about
conducting such a test? The best way is to use the tenets of his philosophy to
draw up a series of questions to explore his belief system.

The Cato
Institute’s overview of key libertarian concepts mixes universally acceptable bromides like the
“rule of law” and “individual rights” with principles that are more
characteristically libertarian—and therefore more fantastical. Since virtually
all people support the rule of law and individual rights, it is the other
concepts which are uniquely libertarian and form the basis of our first few
questions.

The Institute cites “spontaneous
order,” for example, as “the great insight of libertarian social analysis.”
Cato defines that principle thusly:

“… (O)rder in society arises
spontaneously, out of the actions of thousands or millions of individuals who
coordinate their actions with those of others in order to achieve their
purposes.”

To which the discerning reader
might be tempted to ask: Like where, exactly? Libertarians define
“spontaneous order” in a very narrow way—one that excludes demonstrations like
the Arab Spring, elections which install progressive governments, or union
movements, to name three examples. And yet each of these things are undertaken
by individuals who “coordinated their actions with those of others” to achieve
our purposes.

So our first hypocrisy test
question is, Are unions,
political parties, elections, and social movements like Occupy examples of
“spontaneous order”—and if not, why not? (boldface added, italics original)

Spontaneous order is fully compatible with unions and social
movements. What it’s incompatible with is the use of force: that’s when the
order ceases to be spontaneous, and starts to be imposed. The state consists
solely of force (that’s what distinguishes it from fully private organizations)
so state-orchestrated elections and political parties do deviate from the
spontaneous order in that regard.

To most libertarians, however, this is okay, because we
freely admit that the
spontaneous order is not purely good, and are often okay with limited state
intervention to address some of its evils. The spontaneous order is mostly just
a way of warding off accusations that pure liberty would be chaos, by
demonstrating that we are not choosing whether to have order, merely which sort
of order is preferable to the other.

Cato also trumpets what it calls
“The Virtue of Production” without ever defining what production is. Economics
defines the term, but libertarianism is looser with its terminology. That was
easier to get away with in the Industrial Age, when “production” meant a car,
or a shovel, or a widget.

Today nearly 50 percent of
corporate profits come from the financial sector—that is, from the manipulation
of money. It’s more difficult to define “production,” and even harder to find
its “virtue,” when the creation of wealth no longer necessarily leads to the
creation of jobs, or economic growth, or anything except the enrichment of a
few.

Which seems to be the point.
Cato says, “Modern libertarians defend the right of productive people to keep
what they earn, against a new class of politicians and bureaucrats who would
seize their earnings to transfer them to nonproducers.”

Which gets us to our next test
question: Is a libertarian
willing to admit that production is the result of many forces, each of which
should be recognized and rewarded?

First off, this question is not a test of hypocrisy, so much
as a test of whether someone agrees with R.J. Eskow. But I’ll answer it anyway:
yes, production is the result of many forces. Yes, each should be recognized
and rewarded. And they should be rewarded in close proportion to the value of
their contribution to its production, as determined by the price- and
wage-setting forces of supply and demand. They should not be rewarded in
proportion to how valuable some group of people subjectively assesses their
contribution to be, especially when that group of people is economically
ignorant enough to think the financial sector is unrelated to economic growth
or job creation.

Retail stores like Walmart and
fast-food corporations like McDonalds cannot produce wealth without employees.
Don’t those employees have the right to “coordinate their actions with those of
others in order to achieve their purposes”—for example, in unions? You would
think that free-market philosophers would encourage workers, as part of a
free-market economy, to discover the market value for their services through
negotiation.

Is our libertarian willing to acknowledge that workers
who bargain for their services, individually and collectively, are also
employing market forces?

Yes! Ideologically consistent libertarians wholeheartedly
support the right of people to form unions, join unions, and coordinate their
actions within those unions (for example, by going on strike or abiding by
certain conditions in bargaining agreements) for their collective benefit. We’re
pro-market (not necessarily the same as pro-capitalism), and unions can be a healthy
part of that.

What we’re opposed to is, again, the use of force, and that’s
where the trouble with modern unions comes in: they are backed by men with guns
who work for the state. Sadly, today’s unions are not a private organization of
people freely appointing representatives to negotiate with their bosses on
their behalf. The National Labor Relations Board of the US Federal Government
ensures that they are in fact quasi-public organizations, by regulating the
sorts of negotiations which may and may not take place between businesses and
labor representatives. For example, if a NLRB certified union goes on strike,
it is illegal for a business to hire replacement workers outside the union –
sometimes unfairly derided as “scabs” – instead of negotiating with the union.
That’s how Boeing can
get sued for daring to open its new plant in a business friendly state,
which is clearly not just “employing market forces.”

C.I.W.’s big wins make them one of the most
successful examples of the emerging trend of“alt-labor”organizations.
Groups like C.I.W., theRestaurant
Opportunities Center,OUR
Walmart, and theDomestic Workers Uniteddispense with formal unionization,
sidestepping both the privileges and constraints of NLRB labor law, and employ
deliberately non-state mechanisms – workplace activism, outreach to consumers,
shaming protests, and pressure campaigns—to mobilize workers, provide social
support and pressure companies for better pay and conditions. Alt-labor
approaches have proven especially successful for workers excluded from NLRB
recognition, or in sectors (like low-wage service or restaurant work) where
AFL-style collective bargaining has proven difficult or impossible.

Inspiring success stories grab
attentionin an
otherwisedismal scenefor
organized labor. So should how they happened: through wildcat tactics thatonlyalt-labor organizations like C.I.W.
could pull off. They could mobilize consumer pressure and gain Fair Food
premiums from corporate buyers only because they followed the supply chain
instead of dealing with stonewalling direct employers. Protests and solidarity
boycotts directed at corporate buyers compelled companies like Taco Bell,
McDonald's, and Walmart to weigh in. Conventional NLRB union regulations would
render theirentire strategyillegal, as a “secondary action”
prohibited under theTaft-Hartley Act.

So no, we’re not opposed to unions.
We are only opposed to the NLRB and all other government efforts to coerce
businesses into negotiating with unions, or vice-versa, if they don’t want or
need to.

The bankers who collude to
deceive their customers, as US bankers did with the MERS mortgage system, were
permitted to do so by the unwillingness of government to regulate them. The
customers who were the victims of deception were essential to the production of
Wall Street wealth. Why don’t libertarians recognize their role in the process,
and their right to administer their own affairs?

That right includes the right to
regulate the bankers who sell them mortgages. Libertarians say that the “free
market” will help consumers. “Libertarians believe that people will be both
freer and more prosperous if government intervention in people’s economic
choices is minimized,” says Cato.

But victims of illegal
foreclosure are neither “freer” nor “more prosperous” after the government
deregulation which led to their exploitation. What’s more, deregulation has led
to a series of documented banker crimes that include stockholder fraud and
investor fraud. That leads us to our next test of libertarian hypocrisy: Is our libertarian willing to admit that
a “free market” needs regulation?

I preempt my
response to this so called “question” to point out its remarkable resemblance to
an opinion. In fact, look at the way Eskow has began the past three “questions:

“Is our libertarian
willing to admit that…”

“Is our libertarian
willing to acknowledge that…”

“Is a libertarian
willing to admit that…”

In all three cases, what followed “that” was merely Eksow’s
opinion about the way the world works. If that opinion is wrong, the
libertarian could decline to acknowledge it without in any way contradicting
his stated ideology. So all Eskow is doing is illuminating places where
libertarians disagree with viewpoints he holds very strongly, not illuminating
the hypocrisy his title alleges.

But I’ll respond anyway: a free market needs only that
regulation which forms the structure of the market itself. For example, in
order to qualify as “free,” all markets need laws against stealing (stealing
violates the right to property and the Non-Aggression Principle, both fundamental
libertarian beliefs). One form of stealing is taking people’s money or property
on false premises, since this nullifies the terms of the agreement and renders
the transaction nonconsensual. If bankers who “collude to deceive” their customers
are taking money from people by lying outright, then yes – that is theft. There
should be laws against that, as a more nuanced and industry-specific subset of laws
against stealing in general. If you want to call such laws “regulations”, fine,
but the point is they’re fully consistent with the same libertarian ethic that
forms the boundaries of acceptable conduct in all interpersonal relations.

What is inconsistent with that ethic is prohibiting honest transactions which
some uninvolved person considers too risky or unwise, and that’s what most of
the regulations the modern left is pushing for seek to do. The “right to
administer one’s own affairs” does not in any way “include the right to
regulate the bankers who sell them mortgages” outside of one’s own affairs, as
Eskow suggests. If a banker is trying to sell me a mortgage, I can
self-regulate his dealings with ME by declining to consider certain types of
financial offers. But I cannot insert myself into his dealings with others by
prohibiting those offers across the board (unless, of course, those offers
contain deliberately false information that would render the transaction
nonconsensual theft).

Digital Libertarians

But few libertarians are as
hypocritical as the billionaires who earned their fortunes in the tech world.
Government created the Internet. Government financed the basic research that
led to computing itself. And yet Internet libertarians are among the most
politically extreme of them all.

I know he hasn’t gotten to his question yet, but I have to
interject – government invented ARPANET, the earliest form of something that
resembled modern internet technology, as a form of military communication
technology during the early Cold War. They then didn’t know what to do with it,
so they sat on it without applying it to anything for decades. It was only in
the late 80’s when they made the technology publicly accessible, which is when
private entrepreneurs with big ideas stepped in to make it what it is today.
Needless to say, the 25 years after the market got involved have witnessed a
far greater explosion of life-bettering applications of the internet than the
25 years of state control that preceded them. The modern internet is one of the
greatest examples of spontaneous order left on the planet. It is a forum for
exciting and mostly unregulated human interactions from which everyone profits.
To simplify that story into four words, “government created the internet,” is
such a bastardization of history that it sounds like one of the historical
revisions from George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. Yes, government created the
internet, and then the market made it useful.

Perhaps none is more extreme
than Peter Thiel, who made his fortune with PayPal. In one infamous rant, Thiel
complained about allowing women and people he describes as “welfare
beneficiaries” (which might be reasonably interpreted as “minorities”) to vote.
“Since 1920,” Thiel fulminated, “the extension of the franchise to (these two
groups) have turned ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

With this remark, Thiel let
something slip that extreme libertarians prefer to keep quiet: A lot of them
don’t like democracy very much. In their world, democracy is a poor substitute
for the iron-fisted rule of wealth, administered by those who hold the most of
it. Our next test, therefore, is: Does
our libertarian believe in democracy? If yes, explain what’s wrong with
governments that regulate.

I believe in restrained
representative democracy, because it is the least bad form of government I know
of. That does not mean I must agree with every decision that every democracy
makes. Government’s that impose unnecessary regulations are wrong to do so
whether or not those regulations are supported by a majority vote, because the
entire point of individual rights is to identify the very many things which majorities
should not get to decide.

On this score, at least, Thiel
is no hypocrite. He’s willing to freely say what others only think: Democracy
should be replaced by the rule of wealthy people like himself. But how did
Peter Thiel and other Internet billionaires become wealthy? They hired
government-educated employees to develop products protected by government
copyrights. Those products used government-created computer technology and a
government-created communications web to communicate with government-educated
customers in order to generate wealth for themselves, which was then stored in
government-protected banks—after which they began using that wealth to argue
for the elimination of government.

By that standard, Thiel and his
fellow “digital libertarians” are hypocrites of genuinely epic proportion.
Which leads us to our next question: Does
our libertarian use wealth that wouldn’t exist without government in order to
preach against the role of government?

This question
presupposes a flawed premise: that any wealth created in an economy marked by
large government intervention would not also exist in an economy with less
government intervention. When the government offers free education to every
child in America, for instance, of course most families will take advantage of
it, and of course the result is that most consumers and employees will be “government
educated.” This does not mean that those people could not have been educated by
private schools in the absence of such massive state interference and taxation.
The same goes for private mechanisms for insuring banks, driving innovation,
building roads, etc.: just because the government does it in the status quo
doesn’t mean it would not occur were the government to stop doing it. By
analogy, it is not hypocritical for a communist to buy a house, or a car, or a
coffee, or to otherwise participate in the market economy, because at the
moment there exists no communist alternative for her to acquire those products.
She can criticize the existing system and advocate for its downfall, but still
live her life in the meantime.

Many libertarians will counter
by saying that government has only two valid functions: to protect the national
security and enforce intellectual property laws. By why only these two? If the
mythical free market can solve any problem, including protecting the
environment, why can’t it also protect us from foreign invaders and defend the
copyrights that make these libertarians wealthy?

The government has
a valid function to protect national security because it protects the natural rights
of its citizens to life, liberty and property from outside aggression. Violence
can be justified in self-defense, and this applies to large groups of people (like
a country) as much as it does to individuals. Ideally, this would be fully
voluntary, but the pure market alternative would not protect everybody’s rights
(some people could not afford it, for instance, but that wouldn’t lessen the
moral imperative that their rights not be violated by outside aggressors). As
such, it’s not a question of whether someone’s rights be violated, but of how
much violation takes place. I believe that on net, coercive taxation to fund a
minimal national security apparatus lessens aggregate human violence in a
morally preferable way. The same goes for small police forces and other “night
watchmen” state functions.

Nevertheless,
current military spending (and the taxation that must go on to fund it) is much
too high, and current national security policy may actually make us less
secure, so shrinking the government’s role is important to libertarians even in
this field.

For that matter, why should
these libertarians be allowed to hold patents at all? If the free market can
decide how best to use our national resources, why shouldn’t it also decide how
best to use Peter Thiel’s ideas, and whether or not to reward him for them?
After all, if Thiel were a true Randian libertarian he’d use his ideas in a
more superior fashion than anyone else—and he would be more ruthless in
enforcing his rights to them than anyone else. Does our libertarian
reject any and all government protection for his intellectual property?

Actually, yes! At
least, pretty much all of them. The cutting-edge tech companies in Silicon
Valley and elsewhere are at the forefront of the movement for copyright reform.
Google is fighting lawsuits about it as we speak, because they’re frustrated by
how labyrinthine regulations in that field are slowing the pace of innovation.

I confess my own
views on intellectual property are immature in their development; I simply
haven’t thought about it all that much. Believe it or not, libertarians are not
experts in everything, and it’s unreasonable to expect us to be. But since I
have no well-established views on it, my views cannot contradict my ideology,
which means he hasn’t exposed any hypocrisy there. And since I’m far from
wealthy and have no patents or copyright protections to my name, no conflict of
interest can be alleged.

Size Matters

Our democratic process is highly
flawed today, but that’s largely the result of corruption from corporate and
billionaire money. And yet, libertarians celebrate the corrupting influence of
big money. No wonder, since the same money is keeping their movement afloat and
paying many of their salaries. But, aside from the naked self-interest, their
position makes no sense. Why isn’t a democratically elected government the
ultimate demonstration of “spontaneous order”? Does our libertarian recognize that democracy is a form of
marketplace?

No I don’t
recognize that, because it isn’t true. A democratically elected government is
still a government, and all governments boil down to the use of force. That’s
what distinguishes them from private organizations (and to be clear, democratic
elections within a private, voluntary organization are perfectly fine by us). As
I’ve said a bunch of times by now, the use of force makes the order
not-spontaneous, but imposed. This is what I mean by “RJ Eskow’s Rather Easy
Questions”: when you don’t take the time to learn the first thing about the
ideology you’re attempting to criticize, your attempts to criticize it will
make elementary blunders like this one, and pointing out those blunders will be
a rather easy task for anyone who actually understands what the ideology is
about.

We’re told that “big
government” is bad for many reasons, not the least of which is that it is
too large to be responsive. But if big governments are bad, why are
big corporations so acceptable? What’s more, these massive
institutions have been conducting an assault on the individual and collective freedoms
of the American people for decades. Why
isn’t it important to avoid the creation of monopolies, duopolies and
syndicates that interfere with the free market’s ability to function?

It is important to avoid their creation, which is precisely
why the state must not get involved. If there’s one thing the state is good at,
it might be creating monopolies. This happens when the state sells favors that
meddle with the economy’s natural competitive balance. These favors are often
called regulations by people like RJ Eskow.

Libertarians are right about one
thing: Unchecked and undemocratic force is totalitarian. A totalitarian
corporation, or a totalitarian government acting in concert with corporations,
is at least as effective at suppressing the “spontaneous order” as a
non-corporate totalitarian government. Does our libertarian recognize that large corporations are a threat
to our freedoms?

This is the fifth
of Eskow’s eleven questions to take the “do you recognize that I’m right?”
format. He doesn’t get specific about how this happens, but I’ll get specific
for him: it happens when your right to do as you please is restricted by
violence or the threat thereof. For so long as corporations are unable to wield
violence to coerce you into doing their bidding, your freedoms will be safe and
sound from them. And the moment corporations do take up arms to demand you do
as they say, they will by definition cease to be corporations and instead
become something we libertarians like to call the state. If you still hate them
then as avidly as you do now, you can be a libertarian too!

Extra Credit Questions

Most libertarians prefer not to
take their philosophy to its logical conclusions. While that may make them
better human beings, it also shadows them with the taint of hypocrisy.

Ayn Rand was an adamant opponent
of good works, writing that “The man who attempts to live for others is a
dependent. He is a parasite in motive and makes parasites of those he
serves.” That raises another test for our libertarian: Does he think
that Rand was off the mark on this one, or does he agree that historical
figures like King and Gandhi were “parasites”?

No, I completely
disagree with Ayn Rand, and so do many if not most libertarians. Voluntary
charity is awesome and should be encouraged, especially those which focus on
long-term solutions with some sort of “teach to fish” model. By the way, Martin
Luther King Jr. and Gandhi are two of the greatest libertarian heroes of
all time, because they enacted meaningful and inspiring change by standing up
to the state’s violence in peaceful ways.

There’s no reason not to form
alliances with civil libertarians, or to shun them as human beings. Their
erroneous thinking often arises from good impulses. But it is worth asking them
one final question for our test.

Libertarianism would have died
out as a philosophy if it weren’t for the funding that’s been lavished on the
movement by billionaires like Thiel and the Kochs and corporations like
ExxonMobil. So our final question is: If
you believe in the free market, why weren’t you willing to accept as final the
judgment against libertarianism rendered decades ago in the free and unfettered
marketplace of ideas?

Leave aside for the
moment the indisputable fact that libertarianism did not, at any point since
its invention, die out. Also leave aside that the rise of libertarianism has
had much more to do with Ron Paul’s presidential runs and the overwhelming
distaste for both major parties than it has with big-government loving,
handout-seeking Exxon-freaking-Mobil. Why the hell does belief in the marketplace
of ideas require agreeing with the conclusions of people who lived before you?
Belief in the marketplace of ideas is about protecting free speech so people
can encounter all the evidence, and all the viewpoints, and come to their
own conclusions!!! I was going to say this question was beneath you, but then
I reconsidered because I’m not so sure it is.

Instead, I’d like
to close out by asking Eskow some questions of my own:

If libertarianism’s ideas
are so illogical, why do you consistently resort to ad hominem attacks on
libertarians themselves and their motivations, rather than engaging with
the actual ideas? Shouldn’t it be rather easy to prove people like Peter
Theil and the Koch brothers wrong without whining that they only say these
things to enrich themselves?

If the absence of examples
of libertarian societies working suffices as evidence that libertarianism
couldn’t work, wouldn’t the abundance of examples of governments failing
be yet more compelling evidence that government doesn’t work? Perhaps
libertarianism has never been tried, but big government has been tried
thousands of times – and yet it still fails spectacularly on almost every
occasion.

If “government created the
internet” is proof that anyone who uses the internet and still prefers the
private market is a hypocrite, wouldn’t that logic apply in reverse?
Wouldn’t anyone who prefers government solutions to market solutions by a
hypocrite to use privately made products? And if so, which government made
the computer on which you are presently reading this question?

Why does it follow that
just because government intervened in the creation of a thing, this thing
wouldn’t exist had government not intervened? This applies not only to the
internet but to education, banks, etc; all the things you insinuate
libertarians are hypocrites for using. Perhaps these things would exist
anyway without government intervention, but be better, cheaper, or more
widely accessible, etc.

Have any of your political
opinions ever been shared by a rich person? If so, does that invalidate
them?

Does the decreasing
popularity of labor unions make them a bad idea? If not, why does the ebb
and flow of an ideology’s political popularity over time strike you as evidence
that previously unpopular ideologies should not be revived.

Have you ever read a
libertarian text? (no, the Cato Institute’s FAQ page doesn’t count, and
neither does Googling “crazy Ayn Rand quotes). If so, why didn’t you
mention it in your article? And if not, why do you feel qualified to do
battle with its ideas?